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New LinkedIn Tool – Build Social Connections With LinkedIn Mention

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

Build Social Connections

Really smart move on LinkedIn’s part. If you see something in the market that works, duplicate it!

As taught in our Social Selling Training, one of the fastest ways for your sales reps to appear as market experts, is to leverage existing influencers. I’ll give you an example – your buyer persona is CFO’s. CFO’s by nature (like all buyer persona’s) have other wizards & financial “rockstars” that they admire and learn from. These Influencers (bloggers, other CFO’s, Venture Capital leaders, etc), are who your buyer (the CFO) uses as a guide for success. When their influencers talk about a topic like “the 7 myths of Cloud Computing on your balance sheet”… they read this in droves. They digest and trust their influencers opinion.

One of the exercises we go through with clients is mapping their buyer persona (ideal client) to potential influencers. There are tools like KRED & KLOUT, or influencer lists from Cision to help you get started.

The important piece to this is why Twitter has become a powerhouse in leveraging Mentions to becoming a influencer yourself. You see, once you understand who influences your buyer… and you @mention or RT: Retweet their ideas, strategies & thoughts… the Law of Reciprocity kicks in. Naturally, you get lumped into thank you’s, conversations and ultimately their content (eventually with a few more steps…). All of the sudden, you’ve leveraged THE MOST POWERFUL influencers to your buyer… who now spreads your content around like weeds.

Back to LinkedIn – until now, you couldn’t attach a message and mention to a person in LinkedIn. You couldn’t have the article and/or idea connecting all of you together. Now you can! Welcome to the Horsepower that is called Social Leverage!

How Does it Work?

As you can see from the diagram below, on your Home page (at the top), you can write an Update. This is posting an article, idea, comment on your activity section. As you’re typing a message, you can add a LinkedIn connection (like Matt Heinz in my message) and write @HeinzMarketing next to that message (double-up the connectivity of our message on LinkedIn & Twitter).

LinkedIn Message

What is the Value?

Simple! You’re able to connect a great article (that will resonate with your prospective buyers), and demonstrate a connection between the article, you and a market influencer. It’s like me doing an analysis on a football game, and bringing in Peyton Manning for closing remarks on my analysis…

The Bottom Line

If you don’t want to be left behind the 8 ball – you really need to start to take action. The following blog posts on utilizing Social Selling strategies using LinkedIn can help you start. If you are really looking for some hidden gems on how you can attract a very specific prospect, I recommend you check out 42 LinkedIn Tips

Find the topic of Social Selling interesting? Jamie Shanks

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The Ultimate Guide to Social Selling